The Regular Story Continuation- A Segment for your enjoyment
by LeninWerke
Summary: A segment of my work-in-progress canon sequel to my original story, as the beginning and end still need to be written and fleshed out. Mordecai and Margaret continue to develop their relationship, and Rigby and Eileen have started theirs.


**A/N**

**WELL my friends, it has been a long time since I have put anything out there isn't it? I got such good reviews from you all on the last work that I must say I am a bit dissapointed in myself for not taking the initiative to write more. At ANY rate; as you have probably discerned by the title, I am working on a full blown sequel to my first work, taking place of course right after the events of No. 1 unfold. This one will of course further develop the relationship between Mordecai and Margaret (As canon to my last story, which of course is now woefully out of date with the canon of the actual television show by now) And of course I will also kickstart and develop the relationship between Eileen and Rigby. **

**This is a segment from the middle of the story (I have not written many parts of the beginning or the end yet, I work in strange ways) And this segment turned out so well I figured it is a good standalone. What has happened before this, without spoiling too much, is of course further adventures of the park crew sans Mordecai who is now living at twin lights with Margaret, the further adventures of Rigby, Alex & the Russians, and later a trip on board the airship Stargazer to twin lights, during which Rigby and Eileen's relationship really begins to bud. **

**This segment in particular I am rather proud of because I took the trope of "There must be a nonsensical and surreal event in every regular show episode", and sort of bent it from a crazy thing to more of a really surreal and beautiful thing, as I saw it, which also plays a major role in developing the MxM relationship.**

**By popular request; More mush.**

**Enjoy this, I promise I will keep working to present you with the entire story.**

* * *

Mordecai stepped lazily as the wet cobblestones padded against his feet, damp and comforting in the waning light of the day. Margaret was on his arm, brushing up beside him in very close proximity, and the sweetness of her perfume and countenance filled his head just as the day it had when he first met her, and all the days after. On an almost regular interval, she would turn her head, lean slightly toward him and kiss him on the side of his, sending shivers down his spine.

The autumn night was cool, calm and strange. The coal smoke and tremendous, dense cloud banks that towered over the cliffs and bluffs of land's end made a surreal glass set painting of deep reds and twilight blues, straight out of the cinema of old. Lights were winking on and off here and there, appearing when the purpose of that specific light was to stave off the darkness of night for a straggler or a general purpose, and disappearing when the case was those who controlled it were retiring to sleep, on the much more natural sleep cycle this place seemed to adhere to. Masts and funnels protruded serenely up into the painted heavens, and the gigantic, motionless form of Stargazer dominated all, moored over the harbor like some towering guardian. The Harbor, warm and dark and deep, and all the Town is fast asleep.

Through the maze of streets the two lovers went, between the ancient shops and storefronts, the brick and ivy leaved faces of tenement housing and small industry, the wooden promenade of an elegant house, not quite suburban but not quite rural. The buzz and varying brightness of the rare fluorescent lamp, not at all common amongst the warmer glow of incandescent lights, or the welcoming, friendly flicker of a kerosene flame upon the wick of a lamp. In the distance could be heard the far off screech of a trolley, never seen. A lone bat flailed through the magic sky above their heads. Tiny, nonsensical silhouette.

"That was one of the best dinners I have ever had." Mordecai said, quietly and with a tone of satisfaction he had not been able to produce a year before.

"That was one of the best nights of my life." Margaret replied in a whispery voice. Coupled with her light, almost nonexistent steps, it was as if she was only half-there. Mordecai stopped, she continued on a step or two, trailing at the end of his wing, until inertia change rebounded her back into his embrace. He kissed her up and down her neck and cheeks, and she giggled sweetly. She wore the dress he had bought for her upon their first short trip together, to the nameless city of billions of lights and people, a dress paid for by the kindness of a far off friend.

"Mordecai, I love you so much." She whispered.

"I love you too." He responded. Something about the night air was flavored richly and sweet, it filled his senses and invigorated him, and he could feel the same in her. Their connection had by this point blossomed quickly into something where at times, they swore they could feel what the other was feeling, even physically.

"What a wonderful night, I feel so good." She continued.

"I know." He had nothing else to say, he had seemed to himself to become of increasingly fewer words as of late. He did not need to talk so much with Margaret around, she could finish any sentence he could start, and do it ten times better.

The lovers were brought out of their reverie by rapid footsteps and the giddy laughter of two short figures. Rigby came sprinting up the street in the opposite direction, guiding Eileen, who was not wearing her glasses, playfully in front of him with both hands.

"Ahahaha, hard left, quick there's a pothole!" Rigby caterwauled, Eileen laughed through her breaths which came quick from running on her short legs, the couple veered left and bowled Mordecai over into a puddle of warm rainwater on the street. Any other day he would have come up with some retort, not now. In fact, he rather preferred this new view, staring up at the gloriously illustrated sky, and the smiling crimson and white face of his companion.

"How was your first date in a real town?" Mordecai asked jokingly.

"It was awesome, we had a PINBALL date." Rigby laughed.

"Pin-ball, pin-ball!" Eileen chanted, picking herself up off of the old road.

"Whoa, goin' really old school on us?" Mordecai asked.

"Dude, Eileen introduced me to the wonderful world of pinball…..it's like all those cruddy arcade games we used to do only better, and it's got pins and balls and….and…"

"Yer foaming at the mouth dude." Mordecai warned.

"He's actually quite good at it." Eileen stated.

"You won every time, didn't you." Mordecai more told her than asked. She nodded and Rigby gave him a punch on the shoulder. "Ow dude that actually sort of hurt!" Mordecai recoiled, then thinking, "Congrats dude. You finally got me."

"Dude one of the machines was from like the thirties, and it had all these lights and crap….you shoulda seen it…" Rigby jabbered.

"I've seen pinball machines man, always loved 'em, never good at 'em." Mordecai smiled, remembering further childhood days.

"Going back to Stargazer?" Margaret asked.

"Yep, unless we can bunk with you for old time's sake." Eileen suggested, to which Rigby raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah, Totally, we should…..um….." Margaret was about to agree but was cut off by a sly look from Mordecai, with quite a lot of unspoken words in it. "Actually…maybe tomorrow?"

"Ehe….heehehehehe I get it. Tomorrow will be the sleepover." Eileen winked, Margaret and Rigby both went red in the face, and Mordecai tried to stifle laughter. He loved Eileen; there was something so straightforward and down to earth about her. His world would be incomplete without her wise words, and he perpetually kicked himself for not realizing that fact much earlier on.

"I wonder if Alex likes Pinball…" Rigby said with pure invigoration, throwing his arm around Eileen in a way that was quite unusual for him, and taking her away toward the stillness of the harbor. Before they rounded the street corner, they heard Eileen reply, "That weirdo probably _invented_ pinball."

Mordecai and Margaret listened to the disappearing footsteps of their younger friends until they faded into the peace of the evening, and then turned back to each other to again attempt to quench their insatiable appetite for each other's kisses, and they continued on.

You know what's amazing? Mordecai asked.

"What?" Margaret responded, twirling her violet dress slightly.

"That we could hear their footsteps for that long. It's so quiet here, and it's quiet when it's supposed to be. I love this place."

"Mmmm."

Up came the glass window of Audie's pawn shop, and the little scrap filled yard in front of it, neatly fenced with different colorful combinations of ruined trellising and what had once been very fine wrought iron fences and gates. Twisted, dried grasses, leaves and what had once been flowers crept up between the frames of old bicycles, ammunition canisters, Maythwaite boards, motorcycle and car engines, telephones, anemometers, lamps and the hollowed out shells of clocks. Here was a stone bench, and in front of it a small stone fountain that ran silently save the bubbling of its water, for it used no form of pump, only natural gravity fed water flow from the town system. Here, the two lovers sat to watch the night unfurl like a curtain.

Mordecai sat down, lengthwise on the bench, propping his head and back up on its tall stone end. Margaret lay down on top of him, and he instinctually began to massage her all over, much to her delight. As she relaxed, every now and then he would catch her off guard with a tickle in a very sensitive spot, she would jump and break out in fits of sweet laughter, and he drank in the sound. He lived off of her laughter, these days he thought he could stop eating and drinking if only to feed off of the sound of her mirth. She was dynamic and sweet and buoyant and vivacious, but so genuine, and so mild and easy to be with, she cancelled out everything he was and had been.

"Mordecai…hehehe…" she gasped through his attempts to tickle her, trying without trying to stop his exploring feathers. "I feel so light, it feels so good, I have never ever felt like this before, something is different and wonderful today."

He sat her up with him to turn and look at the street. She rolled effortlessly up and seemed to bounce in his arms, again he got the feeling of her being half-there, and again it compelled him to hold and kiss her. She responded eagerly until again, they were lightly disturbed by an impending racket from the street.

Up came one of the town steamrollers, a magnificent and large machine made by the Buffalo Springfield company in a lost age of senseless and extravagant industrialism, a massive hulking machine completely devoid of paint, having traded it in for oil and the grime of the stone road. The engine beat evenly and the stack thumped like a drum with every quarter revolution of the crankshaft, the boiler radiated visible heat into the air and the big wheels slowly carried the iron chariot along the road. The intrepid and doting crew proudly and skillfully piloted their hissing machine, a watchman holding a powerful carbide lantern sitting on the gooseneck, an engineer perched high atop the whirling mass of cranks and eccentrics and geared shafting, and the fireman standing next to and slightly behind him, his face and breast lit up intensely by the scarlet glow of the fire to which he toiled. The engine was a glow with many colors of kerosene lamps.

Behind this machine came another, a Heyworth, with a different beat, a three beats to a measure from three cylinders at one-hundred-and-twenty degree crank angles, as opposed to the previous engine's common time, four over four. The music was different, the paintwork was unspoilt, and this steam engine was simply piled with crew, and all of them were arguing with each other. Snippets of "No you cannot have a self-refrigerating pineapple outside of the Antarctic because that would defeat the geographical purpose thereof!" and "I hate Canada so much…" were heard. Behind the engine on a long hinged pedestal sat the end of a long ladder, the other end of which was not visible for its sheer length, and it progressing down the street. Upon its rungs was hung a proud and bold advertisement sign;

**"WORLD'S TALLEST LADDER AS CERTIFIED BY GUINESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS. ENQUIRE AT TOWN UTILITIES AND FIRE DEPT."**

The sheer absurdity of it filled the hearts and throats of the two lovers on the bench with such laughter as to make them fit to burst. Long after the two engines had disappeared from sight down the road, the ladder, now both supported ends invisible, the first end having long gone and the second end still coming, hovered in front of them weirdly, rungs passing by at an even rate like some blank, never-ending film strip. Just as the two avians' hilarity began to wane, and they thought there was no way the spectacle could possibly get better, another sign, again hung upon the ladder, passed by, reading;

**"LONG, ISN'T IT?"**

Mordecai and Margaret rolled with laughter, clutching at their sides. Margaret's sweet sounds were cut in and out by Mordecai's un-poetic bawking, and this was the case even as the end of the ladder finally appeared, supported by an unmanned carriage unevenly clacking over the stones on a set of tire-less steel wheels.

Mordecai was still coping with getting his breath back when he felt Margaret brush by his side in a peculiar upwards movement, as if she was standing up. He looked to see her rising, but was astonished to see her feet not connecting with the earth. She seemed too dazed to notice, still drowning in the Reverie of her own joy. Mordecai was suddenly filled with a calm he had never experienced. She looked so right like this, she had finally danced off of the limiting ground, she was where she belonged, she looked happier than he had ever before seen her, which is why he did not instantly reach for her as she drifted over him. She looked down upon him, seeming to comprehend the fact that she had floated free of the bench, but did not seem to find it odd or distressing in any way. She _beamed_ down at him with such a smile, he melted and smiled back up at her involuntarily. They were children again, he was the solid ground and she was the beautiful, intangible and uncatchable sky, and they loved each other.

He continued to watch as she hung in the air over him, her dress barely trailing against his crest of headfeathers. The night and she had reached a point of ethereal sublimity, she was surrounded by a halo cast by the moon, having just appeared on her nightly voyage across the sky, as well as other sparks he could not trace. Stars surrounded her now, the sun having begun to slip below the horizon. The red fire in the sky was beginning to out, to be replaced with the deepest blue.

Then, a small gust of cool wind from the ocean came down the street, taking papers and leaves with it. It caught Margaret in its gentle embrace, she bobbed, swung, and then floated upwards and away from his reach. Mordecai snapped out of his trance and sat bolt upright.

"Margaret?"

"Mordecai, catch me!" She laughed, her voice echoing strangely between the haunted walls of the buildings on either side of the street.

"I can't quite reach you sweetheart." He responded, as she continued to rise, and drift down the street with the wind. She spread her wings out and let herself drift weightlessly as he scaled Audie's wall and followed her. It was a game, and it was wonderful, but he did wonder how he would catch her. She would no doubt be able to arrest her own motion when she came close enough to one of the many fixtures of a building or tower.

Again the idiotic practicalities faded. They were experiencing something of pure magic, something that was in this moment so natural, but in others no doubt would be lost to them forever. Was something bearing her along through the air, or was it that gravity had simply lost its non-discerning grip on her? Had the buoyant feeling of laughter become so pure and unobstructed that it had become physical? Again, she was only half-there to him, he could see her but he could not touch her, she was out of his reach, although only just. Now more than ever he wanted to hold and cradle her, contain her, kiss and secure her. Everything about her wanted to be caught, but couldn't.

"Come and get me down!" She beckoned playfully, going along with something she did not comprehend. Every time she neared the façade or wall of a building, she seemed to be pushed away from it. Mordecai remembered one of his many lessons from Alex, that buildings and surfaces generated higher pressure areas of air due to boundary layer. It kept Margaret in sweet limbo, between planes.

The sky took another breath, and another wonderfully cool autumn breeze slid its way into the street, this one far more powerful. The street corners and tall shops created a natural updraft, and Margaret sailed upwards, far beyond the reach of the rooftops. Mordecai grew aware again, and was suddenly horrified. Margaret's calls changed from playful to urgent.

"Mordecai, Mordecai I'm floating, catch me!"

Mordecai chased his sky bound companion as she disappeared into the beautiful blue. "Margaret?" He yelled.

"Please Mordecai, I'm scared!"

"Ill – I'll get you down from there, don't worry just hold on!"

* * *

Margaret felt completely disconnected from anything physical she had known, her body was overcome with a wonderful weightlessness that had a short time before been something she had welcomed and craved would stay, and now bore her up and away from the one she wanted so badly. She danced on the breeze, her feet touching nothing. Every move she made was replied to by a swing in a particular direction, she could not grab anything. She tried swimming through the air, but this hardly made any difference and awkwardly flipped her end over end, and still she continued to rise. She passed a steeple, and then a tall brick chimney. A man was busily working upon the iron tension bands that surrounded it, upon a windlassed platform. Upon noticing her, he waved to her nonchalantly and jovially, and the continued his work, as if seeing a helpless girl floating by through the air was a common occurrence. This alone dumbfounded Margaret to the point of not being able to call out for help. Another small breeze, a gentle nudge from the wind that played upon her, turned her to face the harbor as the wires and streets and lamps and roofs of the many buildings slowly fell away.

She was shrouded on either side by high cliffs, black as pitch in the waning light. Below her was a town half way in shadow and half way in dusk, filled with millions of twinkling, friendly lights. In the harbor boats sat still with their larger seagoing counterparts, a gigantic oil tanker sat motionless at moorings, the great cranes rose at raucous angles, and the beautiful, elegant and massive form of the airship Stargazer sat comfortably amongst them, all covered in the same beautiful shimmering lights, all seeming to ask her so earnestly why Margaret was taking her leave of them. Beyond lay the breakwaters and the deep red lanterns of the channel markers, and further beyond that the eternal ocean and its horizon, now black meeting deep saturated twilight blue, and stars. Stars above, stars below, and two great stone towers rising upon the cliffs to either side, turning the golden rays of their tremendous Fresnel beacon lenses against the clouds and the night sky. All of these lights soon blurred and jumped and streaked as tears got between them and Margaret's eyes. She whimpered quietly. Everything was so perfect, in such balance. The whole world outside this protecting cove could tear itself to pieces and make itself gone forever, and yet all she saw would still be as such, as she saw it, forever more. She still treaded nothingness, she felt so far, so apart. Surely her time could not have gone so quickly, it could not be time to leave, she had just started, she still had so many wonderful things to see, or perhaps all the wonderful things she had seen had met her quota, she had done all that was allotted to her too quickly and now it was simply time to vanish away into the air. She did not want to go, she wanted to be held out of this beautiful,horrible sky. She wanted Mordecai.

* * *

The moment Mordecai had lost sight of his lover, he had turned his breakneck sprint toward the pawnshop, and the Lincoln. It was a long and agonizing drive, his head filling with millions of thoughts. How would he catch her, how would he find her once he found a way to take to the air, where was she now, was she too far gone, what was she feeling right now. The one sensible answer of any clarity that stood out in his mind was Stargazer, the ship of dreams that could _fly through the air_ at a moment's notice. That is how he would step into the air after his loved one. He had never known Alex to fail him yet, and in times of emergency, he was sure that his request would be met with quick action from the ship and its synonymous crew as one working body.

His knuckles were white and tense over the steering wheel as he emerged from the straggling buildings of the town and into the shipyard district, flat stone fills, bridges, railroad track, industrial buildings, great hulls in dry dock and immense derricks. "Have to find Maude." He repeated to himself, for he would need a row out to the great airship that sat over the water, itself the size of a small town.

Over the big drawbridge the car rattled, luckily it was down, if it wasn't he would have swam across without a second thought. The wheels banged deeply on the iron grates that formed the bridge deck. Down the dockside he rattled, being forced to a stop by a pile of scrap metal and propellers, and continuing on foot. Everything was quiet, the normally busy tracks and sidings were devoid of railroad car or hissing locomotive. Cranes stood erect and motionless with no steam up, buildings were dark and not a soul was to be seen. Maude had to be here, she was always out doing something, even in the middle of the night, he knew it, he _willed_ it to be true, and, in never failing style, there she was, her haggard hunched form lit up on one side by the searing scarlet of a massive pier marking lantern upon a great bronze pedestal.

"Maude, Maude!" He yelled, stumbling and finally falling at the old woman's bare, destroyed feet, made now entirely of callous. "Maude, help me, when does the next harbor launch make its rounds?"

"Laft one left fifteen fecondf ago." She slurred at him, fiddling with something.

"What? Look, this is an emergency, I need to get to stargazer, can you take me in that old skiff you have? Please Maude, it's Margaret, she's…."

"Fhut up!" Maude whirled, slobbering from her toothless mouth, holding a set of wooden teeth in one hand and a huge, sharp double-cut file in the other. "I need to fharphen mah teef so reave me arone and find fomeone elfe you big blue baftard!"

Mordecai was exasperated. He found it impossible to be angry at the old bat, she was ingeniously senile and knew not what she did, even though she knew perfectly well what she did. He scrambled to his feet and took off again, skidding to a halt merely feet away where a little rowboat was moored. Without a second thought, he took the mooring rope off the dock bollard, dove in and set the oars in their oarlocks. He had never rowed a boat before, and with a desperate floundering of paddles, he was off, navigating around boat after boat, line after line, buoys and lobster traps, out he went into the bay, toward the gigantic airship.

* * *

Mordecai clambered up the long gangway and into a mess hall, which he rudely barged through. Into one of the main lower hallways he went, almost completely dark, this disoriented him. Going forward, and to the door at its end, he found himself in the bridge, luminously lit by a few dim electric and oil lamps behind red glass, and the deep ambience of the sky from the panoramic glass windows. Here was the respectable and wise form of Captain Salisbury, the stinted first mate Timmerman, and the Russians, engaged in light work with the instruments and in a mild discussion.

"Where's Alex?" Mordecai asked, interrupting them without a second thought. "It's an emergency."

"Gahaha, vhere else would Tovarsch Alexandrovich be?" asked the bristling, towering Maksim, looking quite in part in the deep red light, surrounded by ships instruments and wearing his eternally mounted Russian hat, like something out of a badly directed cold war submarine film.

"Main Engine room." The captain smiled. "Always in one of the engine rooms."

Before anyone could ask what kind of emergency it was, Mordecai had left. He knew his way to the engine room well enough, all corridors leading aft eventually ended at it.

* * *

Mordecai burst through the engine room door and into the maze of pipework and apparatus. Unlike what he had been accustomed to, all was quiet, inactive and deserted, had it been any other situation he would have marveled at the peace of this place. Since the ship's power plant was not making steam and hence, not making its own electricity, power was coming from a generator on a small barge sitting in the water below, and only a few of the lights could be lit, as such the engine room was now a very dim and haunting place. He could easily make out where Alex was by the strange noises coming from a corner of the large room.

Upon rounding the massive boilers and ducking under the main supply pipes to the turbines, and nearly tripping over masses of feed water and auxiliary steam pipes and valves beneath his feet, Mordecai caught sight of the misshapen young man. He stood under a wall of gauges, shimmering brass and bronze bezels around the dials and arranged in a complex and symmetrical arrangement, almost as an ornate print layout on a tapestry, each with a different and unique face and indication of measurement. Below him was the neat and horizontal form of a water feed pump, painted bright green. Alex had his hands on a massive spanner, with its tail end shoved into a reamed strongback on one of the pump's rocker arms, and he oscillated it slowly back and forth with much effort, moving the piston rod it was attached to, all the while watching the miniscule response of the needle of one of the many gauges on the wall, and nodding happily each time it moved.

"Alex!" Mordecai called out.

"Aha Mordecai, I must say you are just about the last person I ex…." Alex was cut off.

"Nevermind that, we need to get the ship in the air." Mordecai interrupted.

"What?" Alex laughed. "Don't be stupid, whatever for?"

"It's an emergency, Margaret's floated away, and…"

"Floated away?" this brought an absurd expression from Alex, more of intrigue than of disbelief or ridicule. "What do you mean _floated away._"

"Into the air." Mordecai reiterated, angrily. "Please do what you do best and get us moving, tell the captain!"

Alex sensed the desperation in Mordecai's voice, but he was in his element, and now common sense overpowered all else.

"My dear fellow, it is out of the question." Alex responded forthrightly, with eyebrows so straight, they could have been used to level a foundation.

"You don't believe me?" Mordecai asked, dumbfounded. "When have I ever lied to…"

"No no not that, I do believe you, and furthermore I have seen it myself somewhere else, and stranger things have happened as you will attest…."

"Then let's get flying and go after her, every second she gets further away!"

"Mordecai." Alex laughed, exasperatedly. "I can't just get the ship in the air."

"Why, the captain won't let you? You have more of a hand in things than he does!"

"For Pete's sake man, I'm an engineer, not a wizard! These days the two fucking things are often confused, people have gotten so stupid! The boilers are cold! Look, even if we were prepped to go, and we aren't anyway, that's a whole other matter. Most of the three hundred crew we need to fly this thing are off sleeping or drinking or fornicating off in town…. I mean let me see…"

Mordecai was dismayed as Alex began one of his long, tormenting and well organized verbal lists.

"We'd need to get everyone back to their stations; we'd need to rig the ship for flight. Prime and light the oil burners, get them atomizing and all that. Don't get me started on ballasting. It would take five hours just to get a head of steam up, from there we prime and set all the feed pumps in motion, and transfer the fuel pumps from compressed air to steam…We'd need to set the preheaters and de-aeration jets in that hotwell way up there, and get the steam solenoid valves adjusted to their thermostats, that'd take a while to get the hotwell up to temperature you know! Then we'd need to get the condenser refrigerant circulation pumps started, and get a vacuum on the condenser itself. Then we get the stack feedwater heaters hot and connected to the system, then we'd of course need to warm the turbines, that would take another hour before we could even spin them. We'd need to get the uniflow engines up topside oiled, warmed up and get them turning the rotors. We would then need to get a vacuum on the condensers, and now that we've equalized it with the atmosphere that would take some time. Then comes the trimming and calibrating….and greasing even….of control surfaces, pressurizing everything hydraulic, and getting all the electrics set. Even if we did get all that done and that went according to plan, by morning we'd still be securing all the open crap and getting our lamps lit and ourselves un-moored and…"

"Oh god Alex just shut up, please, I get it, but what do I do?"

"Well I wish you'd asked that before I started explaining all that….look at any rate let me see, let me think for a minute….."

"What about the airplane?"

"Nope, no, also completely out of the question."

"Why?"

"Carburetor shit the bed and it's out of action for now, and more importantly it isn't even in one piece, it's all apart in the cargo bay. Now let me just think for a second. Well, now Eugene does have a helicopter, an old Sikorsky thing, he goes out and tends to his high-tension power lines outside of town with it sometimes you know. Now then again…..you would not exactly want to go chasing after your girlfriend in what is essentially a _gigantic flying saw blade_….that would not end well. Come to think of it, I think he just got finished winterizing the damn thing last weekend, he doesn't fly it very much….maybe three times a year in the warmer part? Yeah that thing won't be going anywhere now that the rotor blades have been taken off…."

"Oh no….no!" Mordecai cried, confounded and infuriated by Alex's strange complacency, he clutched his head and ran across the room, towards the door. The one person he thought he could get help from had let him down completely. "Margaret, Margaret!"

Alex looked after him. "You won't catch her." He said, petulantly, remembering something long ago. "I couldn't catch her either. Not after all the world's flying machines lay in pieces on the ground."

The pain struck him so suddenly and acutely that he had to banish the memory, filling his head with the sweet symphonic shapes of the engine room that staved off the intense regret and loneliness. His faithful old metal machinery that he could always talk to, understand, listen to its song. It never faded if properly cared for, it never taunted him, it was steadfast, never ill, never away. It stayed firmly upon the ground, and it certainly did not disappear forever into the sky.

* * *

For the first time in a long time, hot, stinging tears streamed down Mordecai's face, tears of grief, tears of utter anguish and helplessness and defeat. He drove away from the shipyard and through the town in a timeless blur of confusion, and up the sloping ledge road that climbed raggedly up the Cliffside between the two great lamps. He had to ascend, in hopes that by somehow raising himself toward the sky in any way he could, he would be closer to Margaret, to somehow help her. In no time at all he had pushed the old Lincoln Limousine at a breakneck pace up the ledge and was driving around the rim of the cliffs, scanning the air, looking here and there and everywhere, his vision all but obscured by his tears. The harbor was quiet, dark and deep and the town below was fast asleep. On every rotation of their great lenses, the lighthouses blinded his wet vision with a flare of sweet golden light.

Tarantella up the Cliffside the car seemed to dance, as the old wooden wheels battered over the uneven stones in the old road. Every so often he would hit a puddle of fresh rainwater and the car would fishtail slightly, getting a manic grip and thrusting itself forward again, sometimes edging threateningly toward the edge of the cliff.

"Go ahead, make my frikking day." Mordecai hissed as the car jostled toward the Cliffside. "You couldn't make it much worse if you tried." He was horrified at himself, for then he sounded exactly like Alex, something he wanted very much not to emulate, despite the respect he held for him.

Up to the top of the hill he and the machine went, close to the base of the South tower, and made the hairpin turn toward the railroad tracks, then back away from them and over the grasses, along the top edge of the cliffs above the sea. He could see the entire town below him now. To the left, the land stretched out forever west, reminding him of the journey he and Margaret had taken to get here. To the right, the Ocean stretched out forever east. To the North and the South, beyond the lighthouses, the coastline. Margaret could be over anything in his sight, could have gone in any direction, was surely gone from him. He cut the fuel mixture and let the engine sputter.

The car drew to a stop as he let the engine stall, only yards away from the edge of the cliff, and a great tree that haunted him in a massive shadow. He was in the middle of the great horseshoe shaped escarpment rim, directly in the median between the two lamp towers, where stood this massive Maple. Sobs came to him in stinging pangs, rising suddenly between short intervals. Where was his loved one? What was she feeling? Surely it was as bad as this for her, and worse. Everything about it was strange and wonderful except for the fact that they were apart. Part of him ached to be with her in that sky, just to be with her and nobody else, without a care if he ever saw the town or those he knew again. He wanted Margaret. As the wind lulled, and the car sat silent, and the town below made hush its many noises for the night, there was a moment of absolute silence, save a familiar voice whimpering and calling out to him.

"Mordecai, Mordecai, is that you? Where are you?" So soft as to be nearly undetectable, and would have been had he had the windows closed. Mordecai coughed through his sobs and scrambled from the automobile, looking everywhere.

"Mordecai?"

He grabbed the brightly burning acetylene spotlight upon the driver's side of the car, luckily he had thought to light it before setting out, and turned it toward the tree. There, cradled safely in its myriad of resplendent branches of gold and red leaves far above his head, was a scarlet that stood out from the reds of the tree.

"Margaret?" He dared not even hope to ask, but she replied.

"Help me Mordecai." Her voice was filled with just as many tears as his.

Mordecai, forgetting that he was never good at climbing trees, set himself upon the trunk and hoisted himself up easily, without thought. Up he went through the lattice of branches, a maze of nature's wonderful geometry, true beauty not made or tricked into shape by any man. The fragrant smell of autumn and the harvest was all around him. Between the black silhouettes of branches he saw the sky and the stars, billions and billions of stars, unobstructed by the offensive light usually cast by cities. A beautifully curved shape rested in front of him, and he saw what it was as his eyes grew used to the darkness. Margaret swayed gently, inversely cradled by a delicate web of branches and leaves above her, preventing her from ascending any further, stopping her aimless drift. The branches had not even harmed her dress.

"Oh Mordecai, the tree caught me, in its branches! It was right where it was supposed to be, the people down there protected the tree, now it protects us…"

Mordecai gathered his sweetly babbling companion down into his wings and held her tightly. The things she was saying, it was as if she had learned an entire life time in her dance through the sky. He cut off any further speech with a powerful and wanting kiss, and she pushed back at and into it. Down through the old tree he navigated them, branch over branch under branch, toward the great trunk, it had to be centuries old. "Thank you" he whispered to the wonderful formations all around him. "Thank you so much for saving her." As he descended, he clutched her fervently to him and kissed her every time he stopped. Whatever awful, wonderful thing had gotten into or out of Margaret, it was still the same, her body fervently wished to escape upwards out of his grasp. Eventually they plopped awkwardly down upon the ground as he dropped them both from the tree, he never letting her go even for a moment. Her body still pulled upwards, and he would not let her go again for all the world, not once, not ever again. Was this some kind sign that he had even begun to take her for granted? Never in ten lifetimes he had promised originally and repeated in his head again and again. As he stood them both up and walked her to the car, they both were gripped by an intense agoraphobia by being out under the open sky, Margaret was affected the most, as she essentially felt like at any moment she could "fall" upwards, even though the pull was only delicate.

"Mordecai, home, I want home." She cooed. "We're gonna go home, right now." He reassured her, getting the car door open, shoving he and her both inside and shutting the door fast against its jam. He was not going to let her go anywhere, he could not even bare to let her drift to the ceiling so he could start the engine and drive. He held her awkwardly in the confined space and kissed and caressed her feverishly, and she returned the actions.

"I love you."

"I love you too."

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"I'm gonna start the car, just a sec, I promise."

After checking around him that all the windows and doors were shut tightly, and even then nothing around him seemed secure enough, he reluctantly let go of Margaret, resisting the urge to clutch at her as she buoyed up to the low ceiling, bounced lightly off of it, and came to rest under it, sliding softly over him. Her full bosom brushed the top of his head, he looked up and kissed her there, and then her neck. She shivered with delight.

Concentrating intently on his task, Mordecai replaced the fuel mixture lever and contacted the starter, and the engine cranked over. As the car got moving, he noted an odd phenomenon. When the acceleration of the car starting into reverse pulled everything, including him, forward, Margaret drifted backward, and would have gone into the back of the car had Mordecai not reached up and arrested her motion. When he shifted the gears and started the car forwards, pulling him back into his seat, Margaret did the opposite and drifted forwards, gently against the windshield. If Alex were here, he would no doubt have eagerly and tirelessly explained exactly why this was happening, and then gone off on a tangent. For the first time since the beginning of the ordeal, Mordecai chuckled.

"What?" Margaret asked, dazedly.

"I love you." Mordecai replied. If he had meant to say something else, he found himself unable.

* * *

Down the hill and around the ledge, and then off of it, in front of the gaping tunnel mouth in the wall from where the railroad track exited. Past obscure shop and building that neither Mordecai nor Margaret knew even now. Deserted streets and the soft glow of gas lamps mixed with the almost absolute darkness they tried to stave off. Mordecai navigated subconsciously, his attention almost fully on his beautiful companion, totally weightless. In what seemed like too long a time, finally came the pawn shop. Mordecai drew the car up in front of it and shut off the motor. He gingerly opened the door, almost too narrowly to even let himself out, as he was not going to let Margaret go anywhere. He hastily made his way around the front of the car, the grill seething hot, and blew out the flames in the headlamps one by one until all four were out. He then got back into the driver's seat and shut the door again.

Margaret stretched her wings out down toward him and he reached up to grasp her, they pulled each other together, he stayed still and she descended, they wrapped their wings around each other very tightly.

"Ready? Just one more trip." He asked.

"I'm ready." She responded softly.

Once more the door opened and out of the car he stepped, holding her to him with a death grip. It was late, and Audie would have locked the door. Through the little yard he stepped carefully, Margaret's feet were nowhere near the ground, as her legs bent effortlessly up. They came to the wooden door and the wide glass window, Mordecai fumbled about with his fingers to the wall, looking for the mailbox, and behind it the key. He would not withdraw his arms from around Margaret. At the very least they were under the awning.

"Let me get it sweetheart." Margaret whispered. Mordecai wished he had thought of that before. He turned around, and let Margaret extend an arm to get the key, which she did, and inserted and turned it in the lock. The bolt withdrew with a loud thump.

Mordecai whirled a bit faster than he would have liked, scrambled for the doorknob and opened the door, as soon as they were inside he slammed it shut. The lover's eyes were wide in the dark. Audie stirred slightly in his rolling chair, head tilted back, mouth and nostrils open, and snoring very loudly.

Margaret struggled to hold back a giggle, and Mordecai felt her upward pull increase as she did so. This was so magical, he thought to himself, so very strange and magical. "Goodnight Audie." He whispered, nestling his head to Margaret's breast, and walking toward the door he knew so well.

They walked into darkness, the whisper room as he and Margaret had begun to call it. They found the stairs, and walked up to and across the mezzanine that hugged the wall in the pitch blackness, a night-time film-negative shadow of light being cast on one of the walls from a dusty old skylight. They passed between planes as he walked them through the dark, above the dark. At the end of the mezzanine was the second door, and into the cozy little lamplit room they settled. Here was different than the rest of indoors, here felt infinitely more cozy and safe. He let go of Margaret to extinguish the single lamp that now offended and hurt their eyes, and when he did so, the room turned the same shade as the sky outside. The dim suggestion of moving rays of light from the lighthouse far above came through the skylight in a soothing pulse every few seconds, and little refractions from the panes of glass made a sky full of blue stars on the low ceiling where Margaret rested. He went to her and looked up at her, she started to laugh.

"What?" he asked through an uncontrollable smile.

"What are you smiling about?" She rebounded through an identical expression.

"It's just, you look so irresistible like that." He said. They both went very red.

He reached up and tugged playfully down at her dress, pulling her gently over the bed, she bobbed at the end of the cloth. Seeing her like this made him giddy, and he knew she felt the same. He had not felt this way since a far back time that he could barely place or remember, and again he felt only a young child. He reeled her in and to him until she was only inches from the bedspread, taking great care not to harm the dress he had bought for her. He worked his hands all over her legs and midriff, tickling her. She laughed and vocalized and tried to escape, swaying in his light grasp, until neither could take the playful teasing anymore. She bent down and gave him a fiery kiss, and he grasped her tightly out of the air and rolled her between the bed and himself. He caught the heavy covers, soft as clouds and yet heavy as could be, and kicked them swiftly over them both, trapping them in a world all their own. He quickly found the small ties at the back of the dress and undid them, having by now done it many times before, and let it slip down her shoulders and off, and he kicked it out from under the blankets. Without cloth to impede them, he made delicious contact with her soft belly and breasts, and wrapped her up in his wings. Her softness gently tried to push him away and yielded, rounding out against him as he pushed toward her.

"I am so sorry I didn't catch you." Mordecai poured his heart out, still feeling as if she was not really there, that he had not retrieved her. "I feel like I took you for granted, I didn't treasure you enough. You could still be gone from me if you hadn't ended up in that tree."

"But I would be fine wherever I could have gone, because you love me." She whispered, sliding her head alongside his.

"How do you know that?" He asked.

"The tree told me so." She replied.

Mordecai just stopped and pondered what she had said in quiet astonishment. Just when he thought he could not love this girl any more, she went and said something so profound like that. Wether she knew it or not, and if she did, she knew things he would never know, she spoke with a wisdom that none, not he, not infallibly worldly and cultured Alex, perhaps not even skips, would ever hold past the deepest memories of golden childhood. He held a treasure in his wings, and he would be lost forever without her, stumbling around in the dark, hurt, alone and frightened. At this moment he realized, they could not be separated, for if this bond be severed he would simply perish. Furthermore, he had not a doubt in his mind that she was telling the absolute truth. That tree had spoken to her, just as all the trees and mountainsides and shining islands would speak to her. Tears came to him freely and he made no attempt to stop them.

He slid them both over to the edge of the blanket, he tucked it under her shoulder and rolled over, holding her to him. As he rolled with her over and over across the bed, the covers wrapped around them like the hub of a spool, as a window shade wraps around its roller, until it had all taken up and held them inside a safe, dark cocoon of the soft silk that tightly pressed them together. With a quick and natural motion, he pressed towards her and they joined in yet another way. They wanted each other so badly, and now the strange feeling of weightlessness gripped Margaret, it threw her into a whirlwind of new and wonderful sensuality, and the same for him as he felt its results on her. Now she was trapped in on all sides and could not go anywhere. They pounded and pushed together feverishly, trying to connect all surfaces with all other surfaces, until neither could hold back any longer. All the pent up wanting and desire for each other's comfort and touch and anchorage of this disastrously wonderful day let go in an explosive release. She shivered in his arms and squealed with the intense warmth, his beak sought hers, he ran his hands over her breasts and around her back, trying to pull her so close as to go through him.

Only seconds later, after many simultaneous "I love you's", the panting, exhausted avians had fallen asleep, locked together.

* * *

Captain Salisbury and Theodore Timmerman had just bade eachother goodnight, and were about to take their leave of the bridge, when Alex stormed in through one of the open corridor doors with quite a look on his face, one they had never before seen. The blue rings under his eyes had intensified; his look was not one of anger nor fiendish determination as it usually was, or even of placid calm, but of extreme emotional distress. His eyebrows arched upwards and he scowled in quite an unaffronting, honest way.

"Alex, whatever can be the matter?" The captain asked. "Did something go horribly wrong back there?"

"Not with the machinery it didn't, mister Salisbury." Alex replied. "I've just been a damned rotten, foolish scumbag and provided no help to a friend in grave need is all." His voice suggested grief and inner turmoil. "You know that girl I told you about, the one who went up in the sky?"

"Yeah, I won't ever forget that terrible trip." Timmerman replied. "What a Ruinous affair, I am truly sorry about it to this day Alex…."

"It's happened again." Alex continued. "To a friend of mine."

"Oh no….but as I am sure you know we can't…" The captain was about to say, but was cut off.

"Yes I know that, but something else occurred to me just now. You know that wartime machinery museum that Constable Fitzpatrick keeps? We have to get him on the phone right now, this can never happen again, not a second time. I will not sit idly by and watch another one go, not without a fight."

"Timmerman, get me the wireless powered up this very minute." The Captain ordered. "Tell them what's electromechanical to rig out the starboard long wave dipole array and power it. Alex, the telephone company had better have a receiver!"

"They do captain, one of the less stupid ones that kept theirs actually." Alex readily responded. "They receive at a lowband frequency of 450 Kilohertz, left-hand signal shift. Hit them with a lot of power so they pick up the set. If that doesn't work, I think a directory station nearby runs a secondary receiver at 275 Kilohertz with a right-hand shift, and they will link us up if we tell them to."

* * *

In the gloom and dark of the street between two rows of high brick buildings, a tremendous clatter and roar was heard as the constable's German half-track skittered unevenly over the road and through the gate of a small sand and gravel service yard, turning rakishly around until coming to a halt under a small pole-roof next to a tarnished and ornate marble building nestled between the others that was doing its best to be eye catching. Around its parapets was a band of corroded bronze plating, and on it read the raised letters "GROVES W. MELVINWHACK EXHIBIT HALL" With a crude sign nailed below it that also read "Police Department" in bold, scratched letters.

The halftrack's engine cut out in protesting noise and out stepped the sole policeman serving the town of Twin Lights, Constable Patrick Fitzpatrick, often called "Patty Fitz" or "Fizz" by most of those he served. His keen interest for historical preservation, aviation, and the technology of the first world war had prompted him to, upon his arrival, buy the Melvinwhack exhibit hall to open his museum in it, wherein he housed his extensive collections. Upon taking over the struggling police precinct, he had simply moved it _into_ the museum. It had not taken much work, as all the precinct had consisted of at that time was a writing desk, a typewriter, a clipboard, a telephone, and a connection for that telephone, the very last thing being the hardest to move. There was not one cruiser or squad car, in fact the old Sd. Kfz.251 type halftrack was a historic first, being the police department's first motorized vehicle.

Patrick shut off the revolving blue light fixed to the fender, stretched his legs and arms, which were put to the hard work of steering the halftrack, and stepped out. He was constantly reminded of his shortness, by being eye-level with the windshield of the halftrack. As he was about to enter his shrine of archives and apparatus, the telephone in the police box on the outside of the building began to ring. "Ach, the hell is it now? I just got back from a bloody false alarm…" He stomped over to the incessantly ringing box as a passing tram momentarily lit up the yard in electric blue with sparks from its pole. He opened the rusted, once blue door, removed the set and depressed the switch.

"Who is it and what do yae want."

"Patrick it's good to hear your voice. It's Salisbury on Stargazer."

"Ah, Auberon Salisbury, It's good tae hear yer voice again!" "When are you goin ta pae us another visit?"

"Right now Pat, listen, we've got a situation, we need your help."

"My old friend, anything I can do ya for and then some, just name it."

"I was hoping you'd say that, here's what we need from you."

As the captain relayed his many requests, Patrick's eyes grew wider and wider, as did his scowl, and he nearly dropped the phone. Among other things, he was to get no sleep tonight.

* * *

A cloud above, massive and thick, passed off and away. The harbor was slowly bathed in a drawing curtain of soft ethereal purplish-blue light, as a dim spotlight would flood the stage of a theatre.

"Rigby, look at the moon." Eileen said, enchanted by what she saw, stopping Rigby by tugging at his arm.

The sky was a wonderful deep night blue, a year ago he would have made some snide and clumsy brush-off attempt. He found himself gasping. The clouds had arranged themselves in a bowl shaped circle high above the cliffs and out over the ocean, the moon sat at the very zenith of the sky, and was a vibrant shade of blue he had never seen before.

"It's a blue moon." She whispered, the light glinting off of her glasses. Rigby could tell that cogs were turning in her head, more cogs than he ever hoped to have. He was so lucky to have her watching out for him, why she loved him so he still could not figure out.

"Cool.…." He trailed off. A painful memory came to him, one that sparked deep regret. Long ago, before any of this had started, Mordecai had been pestering him to say yes to Eileen in regards to a date, and he had retorted singingly "Pff, yeah, once in a blue moon maybe." And here it was. Everything he had ever spoken of and said would not happen had happened, and for the better, and his punishment was the pain that his previous words and snideness and foolishness were causing him now. He turned his head to the side abruptly and kissed Eileen, startling her. "Thanks for showing me that."

Eileen blushed. "I don't know what you mean, it's there for everyone to see all the time."

"No." He shook his head. "I'm a simpleton who would never have thought to look up at it if you hadn't turned my head for me." He kissed her again.

Eileen smiled warmly, that expression he had only seen her wear a few times before. "You'll get there. I love you Rigby."

"Yeah…that….I love you too Eileen." He related, awkwardly, being cut off by a kiss from her.

Back to Stargazer the two new explorers in romance strolled, Rigby not complaining about the long journey on foot as he usually would have, and Eileen twirling about the street whimsically, splashing puddles of rainwater and travelling through her mind across their far endless seas, to shores distant and wonderous and uncharted within the world of her own heart. Rigby could see it now too, and for the first time ever in his life, as far as he could remember, the rusted doors of his mind began to open too, and he began to travel with her. The blue moon showed Eileen to him in yet another new light, apart from the world, a ballet dancer across the nonsensically brush painted strokes of light spilled to make the milky way. Behind the small, kind eyes worked a universe of a mind freed from pain, that understood so much, sought to understand so much more, and left the rest to delicious imagination.

As they moved toward the towering structure of the airship in the distance, bathed in clarity by moonlight, elsewhere across the old, old town, strange noises issued from the old exhibit hall.

* * *

The sun rose gloriously up over the eastern sea. It had been a warm and kind night, now to start an equally balmy and agreeable day. Everything in the nature surrounding this enduring settlement of man sang its praises to the breathable air and the hot, life-giving sun. Stargazer's silvery hull glinted in its splendorous rays, and many who had decided to sleep on their rooftops were the first to begin to come awake, stirred by the radiance and the warmth and the chirping of the birds.

Backed up against the cliff wall, with the entire town between it and the ocean, the little ramshackle three-story building that was Audie's pawn shop was the last to see the sun's rays, edging a red-gold curtain down the side of the four-hundred foot rock face. Underneath the little skylight in its roof slept two soulmates, at the very end of a sleep so sound and restful that they barely drew any breath.

Margaret, on the bottom and looking up, awoke first. The first thing she saw was blue sky, through the skylight, however before she could fully come to the false conclusion that it had all been a dream and Mordecai had never caught her last night, she slowly became aware of the wooden frame between the panes of the skylight, the rest of the warm tones of red against the cliffs above and the ceiling that surrounded them, the wonderful downward push of her companion staying her down against the bed, the stillness of anchorage. She closed her eyes and turned her head more toward his, pulling her wings, that were already around him, tighter. He responded in his sleep and pressed her deeper into the bedding.

She knew not if her body was still free of mother earth's downward pull, for she was anchored so solidly by Mordecai, nor did she care, in fact most of her now hoped that she was. She nestled as far as she could toward and into Mordecai, whispered an incoherent "I love you" to him. He stirred slightly, and opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was her, and his face lit up in a warm smile.

"I love you too." He replied groggily, obviously having just heard her.

"It's such a wonderful morn…." She was cut off by a kiss. When it broke, it was followed by another, and then another, and another. She squirmed underneath him playfully. Mordecai then answered the question that was still fresh in their minds, he raised himself above her on all fours.

Margaret rose involuntarily to meet him, making no motions to do so save a lovely and serene floatation away from the mattress and into his semi-grasp. He pulled the blankets over both their heads and rocked backwards, sitting up with her in the tight wrapping of covers. She drifted from his lap and her head made contact with the top of the cloth tent, quivering a few inches above him. Her face was filled with a warm and mirthful embarrassment, and such a joy. He started to tickle her all over, and her motions in response caused her to twirl and bob in the gentle cage of his wings and the blankets. "Still skybound?" He asked rhetorically. "I'm glad, but you aren't allowed to float away this time." His statements and his light touch were sweetly tormenting her. She blushed deeply. "Hold me down, please, hold me." Where so many times before he had gathered her up, now he gathered her _down_ into his wings, a sweet and exotic and opposite feeling. They were both thoroughly enjoying the new set of physics that had been given to her now that she was out from under the endless sky. He wrapped her in a tight and secure grasp and began to massage her midriff and bosom, which overflowed above and around his hands. She slid back against him and tilted her head to face his.

"Mordecai, I don't want to go out anywhere today, I want to stay right here like this."

"Me too." He replied shadily, still in the grasp of sleep. "It's about time I took another day off. How about I get Audie to make us some of that fudgecake you love so much, and some icing."

"You know how to spoil me." She said with laughter in her voice. He continued on, he had been listening to Alex too much. "Perhaps a ballet lesson or two, all the better for it since you never have to touch the ground. A candle-lit dinner in our little room with all your favorites, fresh strawberries, and some fish and crisp French rolls, we can see if Audie's projector has any good films on it, we can read your favorite book. We can count the boats that go in and out the cove….." Margaret continued to relax into the massage as he whispered out his list, and as he grew more bold; "Followed by passionate love-making in a bathtub full of suds and warm water." He had said it as more of a joke than anything else, as he loved hearing her laughter, but she responded instead with a desperate and fiery kiss and a push toward him. He turned her around to face him and rolled back onto her against the bedding.

* * *

Most of the town's population had gathered onto the sides of Market street to witness a spectacle that had never been seen before. The town square was, at first glance, teeming with the colorful and fanciful cloth sides of box-kites. To those who had a clear view could be seen no less than twenty airplanes, and not what came to mind when one brought up the subject of airplanes. Boxy, wooden-framed and wire-tensioned craft built from the parts of wagons and railway carriages, covered in all manner of odd and brazen apparatus, for they were the bombers and fighters from the long gone fool's convention of the First World War. Varnished wooden propellers shown spotlessly in the rising morning sun. Indentations of wooden spars and ribs could be seen through rises in the cloth covering of wings, surfaces and fuselage. Crew stood about on the wings and atop the craft, where men would never stand on modern aircraft. All was a bustle, fuel being poured through large tin funnels into tanks through their breathers, engines being primed to turn, ailerons and elevators being properly trimmed by tightening or loosening of cables. Most of these aged aircraft had not flown or turned a propeller spindle in one hundred years, although all had been kept in immaculate condition, greatly and most recently by the diligent hands of Constable FitzPatrick. The very same person was at this moment, nervously skittering about this way and that. He was horrified that his treasures were to be taken out and flown, but at the same time so very _thrilled_ that his treasures were to be taken out and actually _flown._ He had only the gumption over the years to take out one, the small Spad biplane, which he had acquired in restored, flying condition anyway.

All the aircraft were facing one way, down the wide Market Street, pointing South, and tightly packaged together into the square as fighter aircraft would be on the deck of an aircraft carrier. Eugene had already temporarily taken down overhead wires, the tram catenary wires, and had actually swung one of the cantilevered railroad signal gantries to the side.

The array of craft was staggering and beautiful. There was the "SPAD" 13.C1 type in British markings, a Fokker D. VIII in the eye-boggling German "Jasta 39" scheme of staggered colored hexagons, a sleek Albatros D. Va in a deep violet, a Nieuport 17. C1 in French markings, a Roland C. IIa in shining silver, a twin-seater Halberstadt D. II and CL. II side by side, an S.E.5.A, a Sopwith Triplane, a Fokker E. III Eindecker monoplane and a Dr. 1 Dreidecker triplane, the split boom-tailed Airco D. H. 4, a Pfalz D. IIIa and a D. XII with a copper-green nose, a Brandenburg W. 29, Two gigantic twin-engine Handley-Page O/400's, and two equally large and identical twin Felixstowe F.2A flyingboats, named, contradictorialy, "Istanbul" and "Constantinople". Any water-based plane on pontoons was set upon large wheeled carriages to take off, as they had no landing gear of their own. The space and weight capacities of the aircraft that would have usually been occupied by the foolish weapons of foolish war, were instead taken up by extra crewmen, searchlamps and powerful lights, telegraph and radio communication apparatus both aged and modern, compasses, precise altimeters, maps and nagivational instruments, items of the search, machinery of usefulness rather than destruction.

At the head of the procession, facing North toward all the airplanes and their goggled pilots, stood a small wooden table, on which stood Alex, towered over by the three Russians, Andre Trofimoff, Mikhail Bilienkov, and Maksim Egorov. Alex was shouting as loudly and clearly as he could to all the pilots that could hear him, and both he and the Russians were signaling to all the others who could not. Maksim was swinging a pair of Semaphore flags, Mikhail feverishly worked a noisy spark-gap telegraph transmitter, Alex held an Aldis telegraph lamp and Andre worked a larger Aldis telegraph lamp, so heavy it could not be held but needed support from a hefty wooden tripod and pedestal.

"And Lastly you lot…" Alex screeched hoarsely. "Lastly, she will have gone in a Westerly direction over the land, if the reports on the wind from last night's weather station records are alright, and they all agree within cross-checks. You all will fly West for a maximum distance of one-hundred miles, and as high an altitude as you can reach, in a zig-zagging pattern. Those of you in small, fast craft, search high. Slow moving craft, and this means you in the Handley Pages, stay a bit lower. For pete's sake keep a sharp eye out. _Just in case _we are wrong, taking the Murphy-factor into account, and she went North, East or South, you in the Seaplanes will keep over the ocean and along the coastline. Keep eachother in radio contact at all times! Should you find her, remember how we told you, come up into a stall and try to get the point where you are hovering just where she is, and _Don't aim for her_ because you've got propellers, let her grab your wings! Any questions?"

"Yes, are we in Istanbul or Constantinople?" The pilot of one of the twin-engine Felixstowe flyingboats asked. "I would like to know how I respond on the radio."

"Istanbul was Constantinople!" The pilot of the Halberstadt shouted angrily.

"Istanbul, not Constantinople!" Alex replied.

"Constantinople!" A second man on the first Felixstowe said.

"No, we're in Constantinople!" Shouted the pilot of the second Felixstowe. "You're in Istanbul!"

"They are the same place!" Alex shouted. "You can't be in Constantinople because it's Istanbul, and anyway you are in Istanbul!"

The pilot and four crew of Constantinople promptly disembarked their aircraft and boarded Istanbul along with its original crew, who began to complain loudly.

Alex nearly tore his own face off. "Any….more…questions?"

The pilot of the Sopwith Triplane raised his hand.

"Yes?" Alex asked.

"Is Mayonnaise an instrument?"

Alex smiled, regurgitated a hairball, and hurled it at the man who had asked the question with all his strength.

"Oi, don't stain up the aircraft!" Screeched Patrick.

* * *

Eileen and Rigby had come out early in the morning when a great throng of small boats and ship's crew still aboard began to leave the airship. All they had heard until now was "Someone needing to be rescued." And "A massive plan of fantastic proportions." Eileen thought it especially odd how there was no talk of this the previous day, it must have been quite a sudden development. She hoped whoever it was was okay. It had been a sunny trip across the harbor as the crew pulled against the sturdy oars of the long wooden rowboat.

When the Mole and Raccoon reached the town square from the pierfront, Eileen's eyes lit up and grew wide at the sight of the smorgasbord of aged aircraft being readied for flight. She jumped up and down.

"Oh Rigby look, isn't it the most wonderful thing you've ever seen?"

"A bunch of planes?" He asked. "Sure is weird."

"I love airplanes, always have." She snickered, tugging him by the arm towards them. "Let's go see, come on! This is the coolest thing ever." Rigby looked after her, she never ceased to amaze him. She looked up at the masses of varnished wood and cloth covered struts and angles like a child in a candy store. Again he could practically hear the cogs in her head turning. "I remember when my dad took me to the Smithsonian, I always told him how I hated that they never actually _flew_ the planes, and most of them could have been flown pretty easily too, it seems like everything here still works the way it's supposed to…."

"Good morning!" She bade those aboard each aircraft she passed. "And a good morning to you!" They each replied, tipping their hats or raising their large goggles. At this Rigby could not help but smile. She was an unending ray of sunshine wherever she went, and it affected all in proximity to her.

Constable Patrick passed, who tipped his large hat at her as he rushed by purposefully. Neither She nor Rigby had even met him yet. Out in front of the mass of airplanes that they had navigated through so quickly, they made out a small podium constructed out of a table, with Alex and the Russians standing atop it.

"Alex, what's all this for?" Eileen asked.

"Yeah, what's it for?" Rigby added.

"Ah, you guys, good morning!" Alex bade them, trying to unstick the jammed shutters on his Aldis lamp. "We are going off on a rescue mission of grand scale." He stated proudly. "I am going to fix a problem I should have fixed years ago."

"What happened?" Eileen continued, intrigued.

"She floated away is what happened." Alex replied.

"I don't understand, who?"

"Margaret of course! Haven't you heard? Someone was bound to say _something_ to you…."

This did not quite register with Eileen.

"Margaret? Floated away, I….dont quite catch your meaning."

"What's there to mean, she floated away she did, right over the rooftops and up to the clouds you know…..like a balloon."

Eileen's expression dropped. "Margaret?"

"And furthermore, if my general reckoning is right with the wind reports from last night…..she would have gone iinnn…tthhhat direction." Alex said confidently, raising a calloused and overstretched finger and pointing to the South and West.

"Alex, people just don't float away…and what do you mean you _should have fixed it years ago?_" Eileen asked quietly and with a rapidly approaching tinge of woe.

"Ohhh some of them do alright." He replied with absolutely no trace of emotion save his usual cavalier levelness and an oddly satirical tone, as if it was all a joke. "And I am sorry I should have clarified, what I mean was I have seen this happen before to someone very dear to me and at the time I was completely unable to rectify the situation. After all, you cannot achieve flight with twenty dollars in your pocket and a pair of cardboard wings. I will not be caught in such a position ever again, hohooohoo no. And people wonder why I clawed my away along and helped build those two airships in the first place? Certainly not the first idea in my mind to go Merchant freighting, despite how much fun it is. I did it because what I remember will never leave me alone." Alex was beginning to appear angry. "Ship's not in flying order _at the moment_? How inconvenient, no problem! I'll just go conjure myself twenty-something airplanes from nowhere in particular, absolutely easy as a one-two-walk-in-the-pie."

His tone of voice was so incorrect for what he was pouring out it was staggering, it was as if all he said was some sham, never to be taken too seriously, and yet after all they both had gotten to know him, Alex always told the absolute truth, and Eileen could make out the faintest hint of sorrow behind his wild eyes. Maksim had told her he usually erected walls against his emotions at the times they scratched and burned at his insides most acutely, perhaps he was feeling immense regret. Her thoughts were confirmed when he remarked, in a much more honest tone;

"This can never happen again."

It then hit her all he had talked about was regarding, in the current situation, the one that now mattered, _her best friend._ Eileen and Margaret had shared their lives together, every last bit of them. To think of this happening was unbearable.

For the first time Rigby had ever seen, Eileen began to cry.

"Now don't you start that." Alex said, trying to produce a gentle tone. "By Fastnet Rock or by Croydon Three, _she is coming back._"

* * *

Mordecai and Margaret snickered uncontrollably like schoolchildren. The bathtub idea had proved too alluring to waste any time putting off, and she maintained her position of security underneath him. The bathroom was dim and warm, lit by three candles on the basin block of the cracked old marble sink. The bathtub was deep and spacious, made of lovely dark blue tiles and from a time when such things were not constrained into standard and small dimensions, it made regular bathtubs look like cereal bowls. Her body was ten times more buoyant in the water than it was in the air, everything about her wanted to buoy upward and float free, and he had to work his hardest and use all his weight to keep her in the serene caress of the water. They had been at it for over an hour and now they simply lay against each other, reveling in lovely exhaustion and relaxation.

"You want to do something else yet?" He asked softly.

"Heeheehehe" was all she could respond with. It got worse when he tickled her. He could not let her go, since the time he had retrieved her from the protecting old tree, they had not been out of constant physical contact. He was used to it now like he was used to breathing, and he knew if it stopped it would feel horrible. He let her upward push swivel them both upward, and he sat upright with her, still tightly together and massaging each other with their bodies.

"It's so warm, I don't really want to get out." She cooed.

"I know, but we've got to dry off some time, and then waste the day some other way."

"It isn't a waste." She kissed him. "This is a perfect day."

Suddenly, there was a muffled knocking at the door, followed by Audie's voice saying unintelligible things through the wall.

"Mofmffh!" It said.

Mordecai and Margaret looked at eachother, confusedly. Audie almost never came up to their room, let alone in it unless they asked him to, he always gave them absolute privacy otherwise. The two notable times he had barged in it had been an absolute emergency. Margaret turned to look towards the door and Mordecai called out, "Audie, is that you?"

"Mff!" It replied, the wall blocking out all intelligible words.

"Margaret, I've got to go get the door." Mordecai said, he knew Margaret was very shy. "He sounds pretty urgent."

She looked at him pleadingly. "Mordecai, don't let go…."

"I'm sorry, only for just a second, alright? I'll catch you again."

"Please don't let go." She clung to him, she could not stand even the idea of feeling unanchored again after the night and morning they had shared. Mordecai had to get to the door, but could not well bring her with him if he was to talk to Audie in any respectable way. He reluctantly and slowly loosed his tethering grasp on her and she quietly protested, edging up against her own will until she finally slipped free and up into the air, he watched her drift upward and away from him until she bounced lightly off the ceiling, still reaching for him.

He hastened to the door and opened it a crack, letting audie see only his face and none of what was in the room.

"Mordecai, are you okay?" Audie asked earnestly, short of breath from having run up the stairs. "I heard what happened to Margaret, I am so sorry bucko, listen, we've…."

"Audie…..what? Wait…..how did you hear what happened to….."

"Don't you worry your head none about it." Audie reached through the door and took a hold of his wing. Every word he said sounded in a note of intense friendship and honesty. "We all know how much you love her, and how much she loves you, every soul in this town knows by now. We've all pooled together to go find her, we won't rest until this gets resolved, I promise you we will find her."

"You what?" Mordecai asked, dumbfounded.

"Alex and the crew of Stargazer got constable Patrick to bring out all the old airplanes from the museum, and everyone in this town who knows how to fly one is gonna go up in the air in different directions find her. That's how we work here boy."

Mordecai was too shocked to say anything at first. Alex had seemed utterly complacent and indifferent to him and his desperate request for help, was this just another one of his games? He had gone from a fatalist lecture in his engine room to rallying the entire town and an exhibit hall full of centenary warplanes just to save his missing Margaret. He did speak up when he re-realized that Margaret was no longer missing. She looked down at him from the ceiling in a wide-eyed expression of complete amazement. He shook his head and turned back toward the door.

"Audie, she's here, I caught her last night…Shes safe right in here with me behind this door!"

There was a long pause. "What?" Audie asked. "Boy if you're playin' games with this old man I..."

"Audie, I'm fine, the old maple tree on the top of the cliff caught me in its branches, and then Mordecai found me. I don't know how he did, but he came to look in just the right place." Margaret said, having to say something, and again beaming down at Mordecai with the expression she had the evening before, and eyes again full of tears.

"Mordecai, look, they told me to tell you, the town square is _filled with airplanes_, all of them are about to take off and go looking for your girlfriend, who is now _right here in my shop."_

"Audie, I am sorry about all of this, what a disaster. Margaret…" He looked to her again.

"Please don't leave." She asked, all effrontery, selflessness for others and walls collapsing to the honesty of what was in her heart. Despite the fact that several score were about to waste time and effort trying to find her, the intense desire to be kept moored and comforted drowned out all else. She knew, just by his expression, the responsibility in him to stop it was drawing him out the door. "I want you to stay with me."

"Margaret, I love you more than anything, and they all know it. There's no way Audie can run to the town square and tell everyone in time, he'd have a heart-attack."

"Hey, shut up you, I've got a few good sprints left in me." Audie retorted from behind the door, beginning to cough and hack heavily.

"No, I've got to go tell everyone before they go off on a search that they will never finish. I can't be responsible for that, imagine how upset they will be if they come back having not found you, after all that effort…"

"Mordecai, _please don't go…."_

"You had better be here when I get back, like don't even go near the windows. I'll be back _as soon as I can, _and I want you safe." He leaned up as far as he could and kissed her where she rested on the ceiling, and then out the door he went, across the room and down the stairs with Audie.

"Mordecai…."

For the first time since she had found herself under the guarding curtain of the old tree's branches, she felt alone and un-tethered, having just been in the security of the arms of the one she loved. She rested on a ceiling that felt paper thin, behind it surely waited a hungry sky. She grabbed the curtainrod of the shower and pulled herself awkwardly down by it, trying to get lower and to a place that was more secure. She wanted, truthfully, to shut herself up in the cupboard under the sink, or somehow get underneath the bedstead.

* * *

The moment Constable Patrick had dreaded finally came. He was helping to add fuel to prime the carburetor of the Halberstadt when there came a hideous voice from a good distance away.

"Gentlemen, you may prime and start your engines!" Alex roared, the Russians signaling as fast as they could. The call was relayed back by each pilot. "Crank over!"

The crowd hushed, and the silence was soon obliterated by the collective whines of inertial starters being cranked furiously at different rates. Pilots in their cockpits and crew standing by engine nacelles bent over large handcranks, turning with all their might and adding kinetic energy to the flywheels at the end of the long stepped reduction geartrains. Fuel mixture levers were shoved to their richest positions and air-intakes were uncovered. The collective whines grew sharper and louder as the many starting mechanisms attained great speed. Crew standing near propellers stepped back from them.

One of the pilots shouted, "CONTACT!" As loud as he could, and depressed his clutch engagement lever. The rapidly spinning flywheel of his aircraft grabbed the engine crankshaft via its clutch and whirled it around at great speed, at the same time the magneto switches were turned on and a spark was made. The propeller whirled around rapidly as the struggling starter lost momentum, and with a clatter and a bang, the engine came to life. All the other aircraft crew repeated these actions almost simultaneously.

Fire and black smoke shot from exhaust manifolds, throaty bangs and roars issued loudly, tappets and exposed rocker arms and pushrods flailed up and down fiendishly like little fingers, wooden propellers whirled into motion and shewn brightly in the sunlight. The engines that had not turned under their own power for one hundred years had been so immaculately restored and cleanly kept that they ran eagerly and readily still. The aircraft's frames shook as they re-accustomed themselves to the power delivery. Pilots revved their engines up into higher revolutions to clear them of excess fuel and cut back their fuel mixtures, the noise was deafening. Constable Patrick ducked whirling propellers and frantically worked his way in a thrilled craze around the craft, giving questioning glances and gestures to each crew and receiving thumbs up.

Alex and the Russians frantically moved their table and signaling equipment out from the path of the airplanes, waving green flags as they went.

"Chocks Away!" Maksim boomed, just audibly over the roar of the airplanes.

"Chocks Awaayyy!" Those who were acting as ground crew repeated to the pilots, taking the wooden blocks out from underneath the spindly wheels of the marvelous flying machines. The first aircraft began to move shakily forward, followed by the next, gaining speed and distancing themselves from one another as they moved out of the square and down Market Street.

Alex stood between the airplanes as they rolled and skithered past in either side, deafening him with their massive motors and blowing him back against the heels of his shoes with their prop wash.

"What a piece of work is Man!" He laughed and laughed, filled with exhilaration and not even able to hear his own voice. "How Idiotic in Reason, how Limited in Faculty! In Form and Moving how Extraneous and Abominable! In Action, like a Troglodyte! In appr…"

The passing wing of the Brandenburg caught him painfully on the back of his head and felled him to the stone street.

* * *

Mordecai would have usually taken a trolley to Market Street, but this time he had taken the old Lincoln. He skidded to a halt right at an intersection onto Market street, and would have made a left-hand turn toward the square had a crude wooden barrier not blocked his path.

"What the…." He muttered, stopping the engine and getting out. "What a day to have road work…" If he couldn't drive there, he would have to run there, it was only a minute away. He did not notice the missing trolley catenary, or the absence of the usual overhanging electrical wires.

Suddenly, a tremendous roar that had been filling his ears and coming up the street peaked in sharpness. Mordecai gaped as the square and swift form of a ninety-nine year old airplane, doubly stacked wings and fuselage covered in silvery cloth and rolling on a pair of bicycle wheels for landing gear, rumbled by over the cobblestones, there in a second and gone in another.

"Oh…..My…."

This was followed by another, a ridiculous looking triplane, and another, and another, and twelve more in rapid succession. A sudden gust of wind knocked him to the street as two immense versions of the former machines roared by, as long as whole traincars and strung all together with struts, angles and tightened wire, the wings holding up two massive engines each, and the tails covered in fanciful looking steerage planes and elevations. He was about to get up when another equally large gust of wind forced him back down, this time came two more, just as large, but with the pontooned hulls and floats of seaplanes, riding over the street on ramshackle wheeled carriages that rocked and skittered frightfully. Several more of the smaller aircraft followed these, tapering off in one straggler, and the parade vanished. Mordecai watched down the street as each plane lifted itself crazily into the air, and darted away over the rooftops of the buildings as soon as they drew level with them. He sprinted to the left, and toward the town square.

No matter what he had seen during the past wonderful summer and autumn of his life, none of the raucous and purposeful havoc that occurred at Alex's instigation or that of the Townspeople failed to surprise him. Just when he thought he had seen everything this strange band of people could conjure and throw at the world, there were airplanes in the street.

He ran and ran, constantly looking ahead to make sure he was not about to be run down by more of the same.

Suddenly he found himself surrounded by a throng of chattering people, and bursting into an open area of the square filled by the vacant spaces where the aircraft had obviously just been, wooden blocks and angle iron lay about on the cobblestones. Empty fuel cannisters and pieces of wire, wrenches and cranks, spanners, batteries, genorators, flags, inspection lamps and hand pumps were stacked in crude and disturbed heaps. He found the Russians busy moving two large signal lanterns and a telegraphy set on a rolling table, and then he found Alex staggering about in circles and blathering incoherently, a bruised gash on his cheek.

"Alex, what have you done!" Mordecai took the young man by the shoulders and shook him violently. He seemed to snap back into conscious thought as the bluejay did so.

"Ahh, god what a nasty whack _that_ was…..my….my friend!" Alex grinned.

"What did you do?" Mordecai repeated.

Alex, instead of answering the question, launched himself into a heartfelt apology.

"My friend – I must say I think you owe me a punch in the face, you came to me in a time of need and I was nothing but a self-pitying asswipe to you, for this I will never stop being sorry, it's just what you said to me at the time reminded me most horribly of something that happened several years ago, a wrong that I could not make right. You gave me a second chance to right it, and that is what we are doing, we have dispatched a posse of no more than twenty self-propelled flying machines of _the very finest sort _to go get your Margaret _BACK." _

For a moment, Mordecai was very tempted to take Alex up on the offer regarding the punch in the face, but there was something about the eloquence of speech that emerged at the stupidest of times, as well as the prematurely withered face, the black circles around the tired eyes, the indentations of so many more unfriendly impacts that he could just not strike. That, and he remembered Alex's many conversations about low pain tolerance.

"Alex, look, after I left last night, I found her in a tree, I got her back, she's safe at home now, safe and very secure."

Alex's expression did not change. "She is? You got her?"

"Uh huh, no thanks to you." Mordecai grinned.

"I am far more glad than you can ever possibly know." Alex grinned just as widely.

"Looks like you did all of this for nothing."

At this remark, Alex grinned so widely that the bluejay feared his face would rip in half.

"_Nothing?"_ He asked, his eyes twinkling fiendishly. "You call _this Nothing? _ Mordecai I have always hated museums, and I have been trying to get that _IDIOT_ FitzPatrick over there to let me bring just ONE of those magnificent airplanes out of that despicable old _mausoleum_ of a building and get the engines cranking, and year after year he has denied me my prize. The only reason I am not up and flying one myself right now is so I could tell you what we had done, and re-assure you myself, and tell you face to face how sorry I was about last night. You go and tell your wonderful Margaret that she gave me the leverage I needed to get _ALL_ of these things in the air, like they are supposed to be!"

"Oi, whasthis about the idiot FitzPatrick?" The constable asked, stumping over on his short legs.

"Constable, Margaret is safe with Mordecai and has been since last night. Apparently a tree caught her. As for me, I think we have had our fun, and I have finally accomplished my mission at getting your collection airborne and back under its own power. Welcome to the world of heritage operation, my fellow curator-collector!" Alex laughed.

Patrick turned red in the face, then blue, then black, and he steamed and steamed and steamed.

"A…bleedin…...tree?"

"Yes sir, you know, the kind with the branches." Alex replied.

"And ye knew this all along?"

"No sir, Mordecai here just told me, and it is one heck of a relief if I may say so myself."

Patrick pulled out the antenna of the massive two-way radio he held and ran off so fast that the souls of his boots melted, leaving smoldering black puddles of rubber on the cobblestones of the square.

"You idiots, She's been found, _Bring me planes back, BRING THEM BACK I SAY!" _He screamed and screamed.

A billion whoops and replies came into the sets that he and others held.

"What's that?"

"She's been found?"

"Apparently so!"

"So they got her down did they? Good show, Capital!"

"Caught her already? It's only been five minutes!"

"Who found her? Which one of you was it?"

"Good work everyone, that was quick!"

"Much quicker than I expected!"

"Wheeee!"

"Now that we are up we are staying up for a bit, goodbye you lot!"

"Too much fun up here, I'll be back in an hour."

"Istanbul here, _not_ Constantinople, going to have a look at some nearby islands now that primary objective has been done, see you all later!"

"I'm on pontoons so I'll have to come down in the harbor anyway, It's nice up here so I think I'll stay up for a bit!"

"You idiots, I said get back here this minute!" Patrick raved and foamed over his set.

The mass of circling planes in the sky above began to disperse, pairing off and breaking away, heading in different directions out toward the ocean, and away from the high cliffsides that blocked their path inland. The droning of the engines quieted and died away as the colorful procession vanished.

"Man, now I wish I _had_ taken one of those up myself!" Alex lamented. "I could have been to Block Island by noon time, and back before the sun set!"

"Yer gonna pay for this boyo." Patrick hissed, coming up behind Alex, who looked genuinely surprised and apprehensive. Before he could say anything, in an instant the constable had removed Alex's shoes with a deft swipe, even as he stood in them, as a man removes the tablecloth from a table so quickly as to not upset the china, silverware or vases on the table. In another instant, the enfuriated Irish policeman began to desperately, and with much difficulty, eat Alex's shoes, choking at intervals as he feverishly jammed the old leather down his throat. Alex just stared and smiled, looking for all the world like a young boy receiving a large Christmas gift.

Mordecai was used to this, and at the same time would never be used to this. Here he was amidst the chaos and afterglow of an attempt that apparently contained several alternate agendas, to rescue his beloved who now rested in the safety of their home. All was well, all was right, and constable Patrick was having Alex's shoes for breakfast, as a punishment for fulfilling these alternate agendas, and much to the latter's delight and satisfaction. This was the stuff of life, what Mordecai had been missing for almost all of his. The bluejay began to laugh giddily and uncontrollably.

* * *

In a blur of events that he seemed not to even comprehend through his Joy, Mordecai was laughing still as he came through the bedroom door and out of the blur. Margaret, without him to anchor her, had worked her way, using several chairs, to the security of the small space under the bed. Upon his entrance, she scrambled out from underneath and sprung herself with her legs towards him, rising as soon as she left the confinement of the bedstead. He reached out and caught her as she passed by above his head, and pulled her into a delicious embrace which she struggled into and to make tighter. "You're back, where have you been?" She greeted him. "Please don't go again, What's so funny?"

"The Constable….heehheehehe….He ate…heehehe….he ate Alex's shoes, because he wanted to fly his air-haaha…airplanes!" He fell with her to the floor. "And I am so happy to see you." He kissed her. She reiterated her previous statement.

"Mordecai, it feels so horrible being like this without you here, but I want to be like this when you are here, you can't go away anymore."

"I know." He replied. "And what happened yesterday taught me that again. I don't think there is anyone in the world who need each other like how we need each other."

"Mmm." She mumbled into his neck.

Back to the bed they went. Something had seemed to have tired Margaret out in the time he was away, which he found curious yet understandable. He honestly felt like sleeping again as well. They had both just been sleeping of course, so he figured it might be hard to get back _to_ sleep, but he really did not care. He wanted to simply enjoy his scarlet treasure. Back into the cocoon of the blankets they went, she settled into the tight grasp of his wings as if she had originated there. She was intoxicating to him, he kissed her all over and she fought back with kisses of her own.


End file.
